“A walk, eh?” he queried with undisguised sarcasm. “In your stockinged feet, no less.” He put his hands on her shoulders and moved her aside, then shot the bolts on the door again and dropped the bar back in place. It fell with a heavy clang that sounded to Phoebe in her present melodramatic mood like a veritable death knell.
He bent to pick up the cloakbag and, with a curt “Come,” moved away towards the door at the rear of the hall that opened onto his study.
Phoebe glanced at her boots, then shrugged with dull resignation and left them where they were. She followed the marquis’s broad back, noticing despite herself how the rich velvet of his nightrobe caressed his wide, powerful shoulders and fell to his booted ankles in elegant black folds. Had he been about to go up to bed? How could she possibly have been so stupid as not to have noticed the yellow line of candlelight beneath his door? But it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone would still be up and about at this ungodly hour.
Cato stalked into his study and dropped the cloakbag on the table with a gesture that struck Phoebe as contemptuous. Then he turned back to her, the fur-trimmed robe swinging around his ankles. “Close the door. There’s no reason why anyone else should be forced into this vigil.”
Phoebe closed the door and stood with her back against it. Cato’s study was warm, the fire well built and blazing, but there was little warmth in the marquis’s gaze as he regarded her in frowning silence. Then he turned back to the bag on the table.
“So,” he began in a conversational tone, “you were going for a walk, were you?” He unclasped the bag and drew out Phoebe’s best cloak. He laid it over a chair and continued to remove the contents of the bag one by one. His eyes beneath sardonically raised brows never left her face as he shook out her clean linen, her shifts and stockings and chemises, laying them with exaggerated care over the chair. Lastly he placed her hairbrushes on the table, together with the little packet of hairpins and ribbons.
“Strange baggage to accompany a walk,” he observed. “But then, anyone choosing to go for a walk at three in the morning in the middle of January is probably capable of any oddity, wouldn’t you think?”
Phoebe wanted to throw something at him. Instead she went over to the table and began stolidly to replace the pathetic assortment of her worldly goods in the bag. “I’ll go back to bed now,” she said colorlessly.
“Not quite yet.” Cato put a hand on her arm. “I’m afraid you owe me an explanation. For the last two years you’ve been living, I assume contentedly, under my roof. And now it appears you’re intending to flit away by moonlight without a word to anyone… Or is Olivia a part of this?” His voice had sharpened.
“Olivia doesn’t know anything, my lord,” Phoebe stated. “This is not her fault.”
Olivia’s father merely nodded. “So, an explanation, if you please.”
How could he not know? How could she possibly be so drawn to this man… find him so impossibly attractive… when as far as he was concerned she was of no more importance than an ant… merely a convenient means to an end. He hadn’t looked at her properly once in the two years she’d been living under his roof. She was certain the idea for this marriage had come from her father, and Cato had simply. seen the advantages.
His wife, Diana, Phoebe’s sister, had died eight months earlier. It was common practice for a widower to marry his sister-in-law. It kept dowries in the family and maintained the original alliance between the two families. Of course it was to Cato’s advantage. Of course he’d agreed.
No one had consulted Phoebe. They hadn’t thought it necessary. There had not been even the semblance of courtship…
Cato continued to frown at her. Absently he noticed that the buttons of her jacket were done up wrongly, as if she’d dressed in haste and in the dark. Her thick, light brown hair, incompetently dragged into a knot on top of her head, was flying loose in every direction. The clasp of her cloak was hanging by a thread. She was very untidy, he caught himself thinking. He realized that he’d noticed it often before. He remembered now that Diana had complained about it constantly.
“Phoebe…” he prompted with an edge of impatience.
Phoebe took a deep breath and said in a rush, “I do not wish to be married, sir. I’ve never wished to be married. I won’t be married.”
It seemed that she had silenced the marquis. His frown deepened. He ran a hand through his close-cropped thatch of dark brown hair, back from the pronounced widow’s peak to his nape. It was a gesture with which Phoebe was achingly familiar. It was something he did whenever he was deep in thought, distracted by some detail or contemplating some plan of action. And these days it never failed to turn her knees to water.
Cato turned and went over to a massive mahogany sideboard. He poured wine from a silver decanter into a pewter cup, took a thoughtful sip, and then turned back to Phoebe.
“Let me understand this. Do you not wish to marry
She stated flatly, “I’m not interested in marrying anyone, Lord Granville. I don’t see the advantages in it… or at least not for me.”
It was such an extraordinary, ridiculous statement that Cato laughed. “My dear girl, you cannot live without a husband. Who’s to put a roof over your head? Food in your belly? Clothes on your back?”
The laughter faded from his eyes as he saw her wide, generous mouth take a stubborn turn. He said brusquely, “I doubt your father will continue to support an undutiful and ungrateful daughter.”
“Would you refuse to support Olivia in such a situation?” Phoebe demanded.
Cato responded curtly, “That is not to the point.”
It was to the point, since Olivia had even less intention than Phoebe of submitting to the dictates of a husband, but Phoebe held her tongue. It was not for her to say.
“So rather than find yourself the marchioness of Granville, living in comfort and security, you choose to fly off into the night, into a war-torn countryside infested with roaming soldiers who would rape and murder you as soon as look at you?” The sardonic note was back in his voice. He took another sip of wine and regarded her over the lip of his cup.
Phoebe, never one to beat about the bush, asked bluntly, “Lord Granville, would you please tell my father that you don’t wish to marry me after all?”
“
“I am not foolish,” Phoebe said in a low voice. “I am surely entitled to my opinions, sir.”
“Sensible opinions, yes,” he snapped. Then his expression softened somewhat. Although she was the same age as her sister Diana had been at her marriage, Phoebe was somehow less protected, he thought. She had fewer defenses. Diana had never exhibited the slightest vulnerability. She had glided through life, as beautiful and perhaps as brittle as the finest porcelain. Graceful and regal as any swan. Cato didn’t think she had ever questioned herself, or her entitlement. She knew who she was and what she was.
Diana’s rounded, tangled little sister was a bird of a rather different feather, he thought. A rather ragged robin. The comparison surprised him into a fleeting smile.
Phoebe caught the flicker of the smile. It was surprising coming after that uncompromising statement. But then it disappeared and she thought she’d been mistaken.
“Go back to bed,” Cato said. He handed her the cloakbag. “I’ll not mention this to your father.”
That was a concession. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to thank the marquis. The fact that he had the power to make her life miserable and chose not to exercise it didn’t strike her as a matter for congratulation. She sketched a curtsy and left his study, making her way back to bed.
She undressed in the passage again, so as not to awaken Olivia. If Olivia awoke, Phoebe would have to tell her everything. And she had no idea how to explain this bolt from the blue that had felled her just before Christmas.
She’d been sitting in the apple loft, overlooking the stable yard, wrestling with a recalcitrant stanza of a poem she was writing, when Cato had ridden in with a troop of Roundhead cavalry. For two years Phoebe had seen the marquis of Granville go about his daily business and he’d barely impinged on her consciousness. And she’d known she hadn’t impinged on his. But that crisp December day something very strange had happened.
Once more in her shift, Phoebe crept into bed beside Olivia. Her side of the bed was cold now, and she inched closer to Olivia. She was wide-awake and lay looking up at the dark shape of the tapestry tester, idly picturing the bucolic scene of a May Day celebration that was depicted above her.
But her mind wouldn’t let go of the memory of that moment before Christmas when she’d fallen in love… or lust… or whatever this hideous inconvenience was… with Cato, Marquis of Granville.
She’d watched him ride into the yard on his bay charger-something she’d seen many times. He’d been at the head of the troop, but when he’d drawn rein, Giles Crampton, his lieutenant, had come up beside him. Cato had leaned sideways to talk to him.
He was bareheaded and Phoebe had noticed how in the sunlight his dark brown hair had a flicker of gold running through it. He’d moved a gauntleted hand in a gesture to Giles, and Phoebe’s heart had seemed to turn over. This kind of thing happened in poetry all the time. But, poet though she was, Phoebe was rarely plagued by an excess of sentiment, and she had never imagined that verse was a veritable expression of reality.
And yet she’d sat in the apple loft, her quill dripping ink on her precious vellum, her apple halfway to her mouth, while the entire surface of her skin had grown hotter and hotter.
He’d dismounted and she’d gazed, transfixed, at the power, behind his agile movements. She’d gazed at his profile., noticing for the first time the slight bump at the bridge of his long nose, the square jut of his chin, the fine, straight line of his mouth.
Phoebe grimaced fiercely in the darkness. It should have gone away… should have been a moment of angelic lunacy. But it hadn’t gone away. She heard his voice, his foot on the stair, and a deep throb started in her belly. When he walked into a room, she had to leave or sit down before her knees betrayed her.
It was absurd. Yet she could do nothing about it. For a rational being, it was the ultimate injustice. And then two days ago her father had informed her that she was to replace her dead sister as Lord Granville’s wife. For a moment the world had spun on its axis. The glorious prospect of achieving her heart’s desire lay before her. Love and lust with the man whose simple presence was enough to set her heart beating like a drum.
The marquis had been standing beside her father.
He had nodded to her.
Lord Granville had said nothing to her. Not one single word. He had simply nodded to her when her father had completed his announcement. After the announcement had come a brief catalogue of details relating to her dowry and the marriage settlements. And Cato had listened impassively. It was clear he’d heard it all before. Indeed, Phoebe had had the impression that he was either bored or pressed for time. But then he was always pressed for time. If he wasn’t conducting some siege of a royalist stronghold somewhere in the Thames valley, he was meeting with Cromwell and the other generals of the New Model Army, planning strategy in their headquarters outside Oxford.
Phoebe and Olivia rarely saw him. They lived their own lives in the comfortable manor house that Cato had acquired in Woodstock, eight miles from Oxford, when the theatre of war had moved from the north of England to the south and west. He had not wanted to leave his family unprotected in Yorkshire and had brought them with him. Diana’s death had made little or no difference to his life, it seemed to Phoebe.
It had, however, made a significant difference to Phoebe’s and Olivia’s. Freed of Diana’s tyranny, they’d been able to pursue their own interests without hindrance, and until two days ago… or rather until just before Christmas, Phoebe amended… nothing had occurred to disturb their peace.
Now she was condemned to marry a man who would as soon marry a healthy sow if she came with the right dowry and the right breeding potential. Not even Dante’s inferno had created such a fiendish torment. She was to be compelled to spend the rest of her life with a man whom she loved and lusted after to the point of obsession, and who barely acknowledged her existence.
And the unkindest cut of all-there was no one in whom she could confide. It was impossible to explain any of it to Olivia. There were no words… or at least none that Phoebe could think of.
